FIRST Robotics (2020)
My four years involved with FIRST Robotics in high school exposed me to everything from mechanical design and fabrication to programming and electronics. As captain during my senior year, I was responsible for ensuring communication between technical subteams, as well as training new students on the technical skills they needed to be successful. Robotics was a big part of my high school experience, and I continue to enjoy working with students in my new role as mentor.
During my senior year, I taught half day, two week long intersession elective courses on Solidworks, robot design, and programming to incoming students.
During the 2020 season, I lead the design, fabrication and testing of the climber, intake, and gearbox subsystems. These mechanisms were modeled in Solidworks and made heavy use of our in-house routing capabilities. The intake went through a number of design revisions to ensure the rollers were always in control of the balls. I particularly enjoyed designing a gearbox that could power both our ball launcher (at a reduction of 0.8:1), lift two robots (at 42:1), and latch a pawl into place to keep the robot suspended in the air.
Out team used the FEA tools in Solidworks to simulate expected loads on our climber subsystems to inform our design. In particular, the bumper grabber (lower right) was designed to comfortably transfer the huge moment loads generated by suspending another robot into the chassis.
Throughout my time on the team I worked to prototype, design, fabricate, and test robot mechanisms and subsystems. Quick iteration and "failing fast" are essential to being successful in the competition, we use quick prototypes to quickly verify our designs.
Assembling an early prototype of our 2020 robot, Obi Non. Matt is second from right.
Although Obi Non hasn't yet played an official match, I'm proud of everything the team accomplished during my senior year.
